Past Exhibitions

February 1 - April 12, 2024

Lennart Anderson (U.S.,1928-2015) was an artist renowned for his deceptively complex paintings that transform common delicacies, mundane objects and a sitter’s calm interiority into phenomenological meditations on light, form and time. His paintings reveal a world of things we may overlook; however, with the tender innocence and humor of a haiku poet, he represents to us mysteries worthy of careful consideration. As he worked from observation during the height of non-objective painting, he often described his practice as “humble pie,” but he was unapologetic about his exhaustive search for an elusive quality of light and the nobility of his subject.

In collaboration with the Lennart Anderson estate and Leigh Morse Fine Arts, and originating from the New York Studio School, the Bo Bartlett Center will host one of the largest iterations of this first major survey featuring more than 40 works from both private and public collections, such as the Center for Figurative Painting, Brooklyn Museum, Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Thank you to our sponsors:

• AHA Fine Art
• Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
• The Center for Figurative Painting, Inc.
• The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia
• Eliza Anderson
• Patricia and John Jacoby
• Alina Lundry
• Ippolita Rostagno
• Richard Spurzem
• Blair and Chris Woodruff
• Anonymous Donors

September 16 - December 16, 2023

From Homer to Shakespeare to Spielberg, the history of Western Culture has been driven by the narrative arc. Stories tell the tales of our lives. The heroic journeys of all cultures, as recounted by Joseph Campbell in “A Hero with a Thousand Faces,” reveal the important recurrent themes of transcendence through our shared experience. The exhibition Big Stories, curated by Bo Bartlett, Noah Buchanan, and Carl Dobsky, at the Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, Georgia is a survey of large scale Contemporary Figurative painting informed by the narrative tradition. Whether the narratives occur in the imagery on the surface, or are deeply embedded in the paint, the paintings of Big Stories open up the viewers thoughts and feelings about our shared stories and call us to find meaning in this existence.

Big Stories Exhibition Catalog (PDF)

Thank you to our sponsors:

• Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt
• Betty and Cecil Cheves
• Susan and Robert Culpepper
• Anna and Jake Flournoy
• Donna and Kerry Hand
• JoAnne and Bob Hecht
• Sandy and Otis Scarborough
• Anonymous Members of the Board of Advisors

May 23 – August 26, 2023

This installation presents some of the very best contemporary realist paintings from the holdings of The Columbus Museum. As a survey in miniature, the exhibition provides visual evidence to students and visitors of the style’s different inflections since the 1950s. In addition, the exhibition will chart how the use of realism has evolved from straightforward transcription to encompass more conceptual approaches. Featured artists include Janet Fish, Burt Silverman, Wes Hempel, Jack Beal, and Bo Bartlett.

June 9 – August 12, 2023

Beyond Go Figure was originally created to showcase and honor the many Board Members and Friends of the Center who are artists. This exhibition features works created by them as well as pieces produced by our local talent. Last year was truly a celebration of the wealth of artistic talent in and around Columbus, GA, and the center is thrilled that we are hosting Beyond Go Figure IV this year with hopes to show even more of the local artists in the area.

Thank you to our sponsors:
JoAnne and Bob Hecht

February 7 – April 28, 2023

Earthly Matters presents a selection of Bartlett’s recent works that examine humankind’s impact on and interaction with nature’s elements. Bartlett’s subjects, both human and animal, find themselves in precarious environmental situations, either from their own doing or by forces beyond their control. Bartlett’s appreciation for the beauty of ordinary moments imbues his work with an underlying luminosity and frankness. His larger-than-life scenes break down the barriers between the subjects on canvas and the viewers, who are invited to contemplate their role in the narrative.

This exhibition was curated by the Gibbes Museum of Art and is a traveling exhibition.

September 2 – December 10

The Bo Bartlett Center is once again hosting the annual South Arts exhibition in 2022 which includes nine artists residing in nine southern states. These artists are selected from a pool of more than 800 applicants by a panel of jurors to receive their respective state fellowships. The artistry on display is a testament to the strength of art in the south, presenting diverse themes, visions, and styles. South Arts is a nonprofit regional arts organization empowering artists, organizations, and communities, and increasing access to arts and culture.

In partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the State Arts Agencies of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee — with additional funding from other public and private donors such as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — South Arts supports artists and organizations through a rich and responsive portfolio of grants, fellowships, and programs.

Exhibition Sponsors:
The Hughston Clinic
Bettye and Cecil Cheves

February 4 – June 10

Curated by Jonathan F. Walz, MIRROR|ЯOЯЯIM: American Self-Portraits in the Expanded Field will provide visual evidence to students and visitors of different self-portraiture styles through time as well as changing ideas about the self. It is conceived in two complementary parts. The first part provides an overview of historical American self-portrait drawings, containing works from local collections and a self-portrait by Bo Bartlett. The second part will contain a display of recent self-portraits from across the country.

MIRROR|ЯOЯЯIM: American Self-Portraits Catalog (PDF)

Thank you to our Sponsors:
Exhibition Sponsors: Becky & Asa Swift
Reception Sponsors: Ruth & Jimmy Yancey
Catalog Sponsors: Sue Anne & Champ Baker / Sandy & Otis Scarborough

January 21 – March 25

As in previous years, a selected body of work from the Department of Art Faculty will be curated and exhibited in both the Bo Bartlett Centers galleries, as well as the Department of Art Illges Gallery. The CSU Department of Art Faculty Exhibition will contain a variety of work from the current faculty of the Columbus State University Art Department including printmaking, ceramics, photography, sculpture, installation, animation, painting, and mixed media work.

In-Sync: CSU Department of Art Faculty Exhibition Catalog (PDF)

Thank you to our Sponsors:
Exhibition, Reception, and Catalog Sponsor: The Norman S. and Emmy Lou P. Illges Foundation

COMPETERE is a survey of Contemporary artist couples who are individually a vital part of the current New York art scene. This exhibition explores the concerns of artist couples while also comparing and contrasting the variety of artmaking approaches and choices related to gender, location, and context.

“The Latin word competere means to “strive together.” It is the root of the English word “competition.” Whereas “competition” suggests rivals, one faction determined to overcome the other – competere means two equals striving for the betterment of both.

In America, we are unaccustomed to such self-effacing practices. We are dog-eat-dog, everyone out for themselves. Yet, Art, unlike sports, politics, technology or industry, is a more benevolent enterprise. Within the artistic community, artists work in the privacy of their studios, all the while, keeping an eye on what other artists are doing, often feeding off a shared synergy to inform their own work. Art is evolutionary, building upon itself and what came before. Competere is ubiquitous and instrumental in Art history…”

– Betsy Eby and Bo Bartlett

Thank you to our Sponsors:
Exhibition Sponsors: JoAnne and Robert Hecht
Programming Sponsors: Becky and Sidney Yarbrough
Reception Sponsors: Anonymous Donors
Catalog Sponsors: Anna and Jake Flournoy

Competere: An Exhibition of Artist Couples Catalog (PDF)

July 1 – August 13, 2022

Beyond Go Figure was originally created to showcase and honor the many Board Members and Friends of the Center who are artists. This exhibition features works created by them as well as pieces produced by our local talent. Last year was truly a celebration of the wealth of artistic talent in and around Columbus, GA, and the center is thrilled that we are hosting Beyond Go Figure III this year with hopes to show even more of the local artists in the area.

Thank you to our sponsors:
Exhibition: Donna and Kerry Hand
Reception: JoLyn and A.J Morris

September 2 – November 25

The goals of The Bennett Prize are to support and promote the careers of women artists working or endeavoring to work as full time professionals, and to provide greater exposure for figurative realism. The winning artist receives $50,000 over a two year period to support her practice and a solo show exhibition to premiere the work produced through The Prize.

The exhibition is comprised of the paintings of the ten finalists for The Bennett Prize, as determined by a panel of jurors from a national call for entries. All of the artworks incorporate the realistic portrayal of the human figure.

Thank you to our Sponsors:
Exhibition, Catalog, and Reception Sponsors: Shannon and Peter Candler | Helen and Comer Hobbs

2022 Bennett Prize 2021 Catalog (PDF)

August 20 – December 20

The Bo Bartlett Center will once again host the annual South Arts exhibition in 2021 to include nine artists residing in nine southern states. These artists are selected from a pool of more than 800 applicants by a panel of jurors to receive their respective state fellowships. The artistry on display is a testament to the strength of art in the south, presenting diverse themes, visions, and styles. South Arts is a nonprofit regional arts organization empowering artists, organizations, and communities, and increasing access to arts and culture.

In partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the State Arts Agencies of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee — with additional funding from other public and private donors such as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — South Arts supports artists and organizations through a rich and responsive portfolio of grants, fellowships, and programs.

South Arts 2021 Catalog (PDF)

“Music as Image and Metaphor”Selections from the Kentler Flatfiles

January 22 – March 20, 2021

Music as Image and Metaphor brings together forty-one works by twenty-eight artists from the Kentler Flatfiles focused on the theme of music. The theme of music-as-image includes works that were directly inspired by or are illustrative of sound art, while the image-as-metaphor theme encompasses a diverse group of works that, directly or indirectly, reflect the structure and artistic goals of musical composition and improvisation. As an incentive to the viewer to pursue these rich connections more deeply, the exhibition also includes a suite of one-minute musical responses to each graphic work, specially created for the installation at the Bartlett Center. Some of the connections are direct and clear, others poetic or even fanciful. Whatever the connection, this exhibition celebrates the ongoing dance between the visual and the aural that is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

Musical Responses: To listen press the AUDIO button under each artwork on the Kentler exhibition page.

The show includes a suite of miniature musical correspondences, one for each visual work, created by composer-pianist Michael Kowalski and percussionist-composer Allen Otte. Kowalski and Otte explore the various ways that a musical composition can relate to a visual composition: as a gestural dialogue, as a thematic extension or development, as a compositional analogy, as a soundtrack, or as a spontaneous reaction. The results are often surprising, sometimes baffling, but always illuminating.

The Kentler Flatfiles are an essential element of Kentler International Drawing Space since its founding in 1990. A compendium of artworks by more than 290 local, national and international artists, this living archive represents the breadth, quality and variety found in contemporary drawings and works on paper today. The Flatfiles are available for viewing by the public and have become an important resource for artists, collectors, curators and anyone interested in the field of drawing and prints. Selections from the Kentler Flatfiles are regularly presented in guest-curated exhibitions at Kentler and in traveling shows.

Kentler has also just installed 2 companion shows to Music as Image and Metaphor: Variations in Black & White. Ten artists from the current exhibition in Columbus are presented in Kentler’s front gallery with black and white works on paper. If you are interested in the sister show in Brooklyn, please click here.

Co-Curators: David Houston and Florence Neal

Musical track by Michael Kowalski and Allen Otte

Artists:
Herbert Brün, Beth Caspar, Phillip Chen, Abby Goldstein, Takuji Hamanaka, Keiko Hara, robin holder, Richard Howe, Hannah Israel, Mary Judge, Kazuhiro Nishijima, Ralph Kiggell, Rosalinda Kolb, Jiří Kornatovský, Robert Lansden, Simon Lewandowski, Jim Napierala, Florence Neal, Margaret Neill, Morgan O’Hara, Gahae Park, Jaanika Peerna, Scott Pfaffman, Orlando Richards, Susan Schwalb, Viviane Rombaldi Seppey, Molly Snyder-Fink, Hugh Williams

January 22 – March 20, 2021

Virtual Panel Discussion: February 25, 5:30pm

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Preview the Music as Image and Metaphor Catalog (PDF)

David W. Houston is currently the Director of the Ohr O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Artist and Curator Florence Neal is Co-Founder and Director of Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, New York.

Composer-pianist Michael Kowalski and percussionist-composer Allen Otte have been collaborating on musical projects since the early 1970s. In addition to his work as a soloist, teacher, and composer, Otte is a founding member of two of the most important multiple percussion groups in the United States, the Blackearth Percussion Group and The Percussion Group/Cincinnati. Kowalski was a pioneer in computer-assisted sound synthesis and algorithmic composition in the 1970s. After years of composing primarily for percussion, dance, and electronics, he turned to theatre and chamber opera in the 1990s. Kowalski’s “Gringo Blaster,” commissioned and premiered by Otte and the Percussion Group/Cincinnati, is available on an Einstein Records CD of the same name.

Sponsors of Music as Image and Metaphor:

Kay Broda

Judye Harris

Janice Watson

August 20 – December 20

This exhibition reflects on living in and looking at the southern region of the United States. In response to the country’s recent social reawakening, the exhibit invites critique, analysis, investigation, and admiration for what it means to be a man, a good man, a southern man. The combination of photos examines issues centered on desire, race, religion, class, and gender. It will be exhibited from August 20th – December 20th. The work will be on loan from the Do Good Fund.

The Do Good Fund, Inc. is a Columbus, Georgia based public charity. Since it’s founding in 2012, the fund has focused on building a museum quality collection of photographs taken in the American South since World War II. The collection ranges from works by more than 20 Guggenheim Fellows to images by lesser-known and emerging photographers working in the region. Do Good’s mission is to make its collection of nearly 600 images broadly accessible through regional museums, nonprofit galleries, and nontraditional venues and to encourage complimentary, community-based programing to accompany each exhibition.

Looking Male Catalog (PDF)

Sponsors of Looking Male:
Exhibition & Catalog Sponsor: An Anonymous Member of the Board
Reception Sponsors: Hughston Clinic

April 9 – June 18, 2021

Working out of his studio in Belmont, North Carolina, artist Juan Logancontinues to expand his art’s unyielding call for social responsibility. A retired University of North Carolina Professor, Logan’s installations, sculptures, prints, and paintings are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Art, and many more. Through his many exhibitions and a very successful career, Juan has amassed a collection of works from his friends and sources of inspiration in the art world. Not only will this exhibition share his many holdings by the most important artists from the 1970s to the present, it will also present Juan’s own work in dialogue with his collection. The galleries will examine the role that Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Motherwell, Thornton Dial, and more have played in Juan’s practice as an artist and how collecting has informed his creative process.

Watch the Virtual Art Talk with Juan Logan that was on April 15, 2021.

Juan Logan: Creating and Collecting Catalog (PDF)

This exhibition originated at the Hickory Museum of Art.

Sponsors of Creating & Collecting:

Sue Anne & Champ Baker

Sandy & Otis Scarborough

January 22 – March 20, 2021

From the ceilings of ancient caves to the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, art has always been an essential part of human life. Whether it be for shamanistic purposes, to tell a story, or simply to record an observation the images we weave together are our attempts to reconcile the tension between our interior world and the world we live in; the objective experience and the subjective perception of our experience. This is the starting point of art, and drawing is the first visible manifestation of the union between these worlds.

The collection of works gathered here mark the first major exhibition of Bo Bartlett’s drawings. These works span forty years of the artist’s career, revealing an intimate peek into a side of the artists’ life and oeuvre rarely seen by the public. It contains not only drawings in graphite, but also more colorful works in gouache. The drawings strike a potent counterpoint to the larger-than-life paintings that have defined Bo’s career. As much as some of these drawings may reveal the embryonic stages of larger ideas, these works are not intended as a means to an end. They are autonomous records, existing as their own articulations and representations of movement in time.

Sponsors of 40 Years of Drawing Catalog:

Pat S. & Thelon A. Hamby III

Amandah S. & John T. Turner

Preview 40 Years of Drawing Catalog (PDF)

August 18, 2020 – January 8, 2021

The South Arts Southern Prize and State Fellowships celebrate and support the highest quality artistic work being created in the American South. The exhibition will feature works from the 2020 State Fellowship Artists.

The Bo Bartlett Center’s publication on South Arts 2020 Southern Prize and State Fellows (PDF)

About South Arts

South Arts advances Southern vitality through the arts. The nonprofit regional arts organization was founded in 1975 to build on the South’s unique heritage and enhance the public value of the arts. South Arts’ work responds to the arts environment and cultural trends with a regional perspective. South Arts offers an annual portfolio of activities designed to support the success of artists and arts providers in the South, address the needs of Southern communities through impactful arts-based programs, and celebrate the excellence, innovation, value and power of the arts of the South. For more information, visit SouthArts.org.

Featuring Artwork of the Bartlett Center Board of Advisors and Friends.

Many members of the Bartlett Center’s Board of Advisors are artists. The “Beyond Go Figure” exhibition will feature works created by them as well as works created by “Friends of the Center.”

Participants include: Don Beck, Helen Brooks, Sally Bradley, Shannon Candler, Bettye Cheves, Dorothy Cheves, Betty Corn, Susan Culpepper, Geri Davis, Susan Dolan, Sia Etemadi, Kristy Edwards, Jo Farris, Suzanne Reed Fine, Jack Flournoy, Dana Freeman, Sally Gates, Thelon Hamby, Robert Hecht, Bunny Hinzman, Helen Hobbs, Jarrett Holbrook, Maudie Huff, Katie Jacobson, Helen Johnson, Jessica Kennedy, Cora King, Nick Knowles, Gloria Mani, Jonathan MacGregor, Jan Miller Elkins, Randy Nguyen, Elizabeth Ogie, Margaret M. Page, Jill Chancey Philips, Garry Pound, Sandy Scarborough, Adleyn Scott, Kate Scrivner, Ashlyn Simmons, Karen Stewart, Kate Waddell, Katherine Waddell, Anastasia Waldecker, Julianna Wells, Susan Wiggins, Pat Wilensky, Kate Wilson, and John Wright.

August 18, 2020 – January 8, 2021

Born in 1977 in New Jersey, Alyssa began oil painting as a child. She studied at The New School in New York and Montclair State University and earned her B.A. from Boston College in 1999. During this time, she studied painting at Lorenzo dé Medici in Florence. She went on to earn her M.F.A. from the New York Academy of Art in 2001. She completed an artist residency at Fullerton College in 2006 and has lectured and taught at universities worldwide.

The tension in her paintings is sustained by the composition and also by the surface quality itself. Each brushstroke is thickly applied, like a fossil recording every gesture and decision, evoking the energy of the handmade object. The unpredictable, activated surface recalls the human experience, creating empathy in the work. “I strive to create a moment in a painting where the viewer can see or feel themselves, identify with the subject, even be the subject, connect with it as though it is about them, for them.”

Recently, she was named the 16th most influential woman artist alive today by Graphic Design Degree Hub. Her work was featured heavily in season 6 of the FX series The Americans in 2018.

View the Alyssa Monks Exhibition Catalog (PDF)

The Bo Bartlett Center will proudly feature 35 paintings by internationally renowned artist Wolf Kahn, October 1, 2019 through January 13, 2020.

About Wolf Kahn

Wolf Kahn (b. 1927, Stuttgart, Germany) immigrated to the United States in 1940. After settling in New York City, Kahn studied briefly with Stuart Davis before going on to study with the influential artist and teacher, Hans Hoffman during the rise of the New York School and Abstract Expressionism.

Kahn is known for his shimmering, atmospheric landscapes with sweeping bands of color and spontaneous mark-making. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and a US State Department International Medal of Art. Kahn’s work is in museum collections throughout the United States including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Wolf Kahn Catalog (PDF)

The Charleston, South Carolina artist Manning Williams earned a Bachelors Degree in English from the College of Charleston and a Master's Degree in Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While at the Academy he began forging a highly personal approach to realist painting, a style he continued for decades upon his return to Charleston. Eschewing the picturesque subjects long associated with Charleston art and artists, he found his subjects on the periphery of the city and along the barrier islands, often concentrating on overlooked people and places.

The Man with the Canoe series began in the mid 1980’s with a wood carving, and later a bronze cast of the subject. The first painting to include the man in the canoe is the orange still life with a poster of Peter Paul Rubens in the Background. The man in the canoe became a device to introduce the viewer to a range of subject matter, and in fact becomes a proxy for the viewer. Conflating past and present, profound historic events and the everyday, the man in the canoe is an observer of war, human cruelty, and environmental loss and neglect. The most important paintings are largely dark and monochromatic and painted in a dramatic narrative approach that dramatizes a slice of a larger historical event or enigmatic subjects with an undertone of malice.

Manning taught at The Gibbes Museum Art School and the College of Charleston. In the last two decades of his life Williams shifted his work from realism to abstraction. Inspired by his comic book collection, television and the digital technology rapidly changing the world. He saw this work as a continuation of his earlier work and wrote, “I consider myself a narrative painter. Yet times have changed the way we see the world. TV, movies, and the internet pour out information faster than we could have imagined only a few years back. My work today is about finding new ways to narrate our times.”

The Man in the Canoe: Works by Manning Williams Catalog (PDF)

The South Arts Southern Prize and State Fellowships celebrate and support the highest quality artistic work being created in the American South. The exhibition will feature works from the 2019 State Fellowship Artists:

Jamey Grimes. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Sculpture.
Amy Gross. Delray Beach, Florida. Sculpture.
Bo Bartlett. Columbus, Georgia. Painting.
Lori Larusso. Lexington, Kentucky. Painting.
Stephanie Patton. Lafayette, Louisiana. Multidisciplinary.
Rory Doyle. Cleveland, Mississippi. Photography.
Andrew Hayes. Asheville, North Carolina. Sculpture.
Virginia Scotchie. Columbia, South Carolina. Crafts.
Andrew Scott Ross. Johnson City, Tennessee. Multidisciplinary.

Bo Bartlett was recently awarded the 2019 South Arts State Fellowship award for Georgia.

About South Arts

South Arts advance Southern vitality through the arts. The nonprofit regional arts organization was founded in 1975 to build on the South’s unique heritage and enhance the public value of the arts. South Arts’ work responds to the arts environment and cultural trends with a regional perspective. South Arts offers an annual portfolio of activities designed to support the success of artists and arts providers in the South, address the needs of Southern communities through impactful arts-based programs, and celebrate the excellence, innovation, value and power of the arts of the South. For more information, visit SouthArts.org.

South Arts is on view in the Hecht and Yarbrough galleries from May 23 through September 13, 2019.

The South Arts 2019 Southern Prize and State Fellows Catalog (PDF)

Co-curated by Bo Bartlett and Betsy Eby, Peers & Influences represented a handful of artists who have been significant within their circle of friendships as either mentors, teachers, friends or contemporaries of Bartlett. This body of work represented various approaches to both the human form and nature through three generations of artists ranging from Raphael and Moses Soyer, born 1899 to Jordan Sokol, born 1979.

The opening reception of the Rebecca K. and Sidney H. Yarbrough III, M.D. and JoAnne J. and Robert G. Hecht Visiting Artist Galleries included the following artists: Steven Assael, Man Bartlett, Morris Blackburn, Will Cotton, Vincent Desiderio, Harvey Dinnerstein, Betsy Eby, Inka Essenhigh, Randall Exon, Eric Fischl, Amaya Gurpide, Kate Javens, Wolf Kahn, Ben Kamihira, Jeff Koons, Julio Larraz, David Ligare, Ben Long, Sally Mann, Alyssa Monks, Steve Mumford, Odd Nerdrum, Sarah Peters, William Powhida, Nelson Shanks, Amy Sherald, Wade Schuman, Jordon Sokol, Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Patricia Traub, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth.

This exhibition was up January 18 to March 31, 2018, and was made possible by support from:

Robert W. & Susan S. Culpepper

Wade H. & Teresa Pike Tomlinson

Keith & Ann Douglas

Bo Bartlett & Betsy Eby

Masters of Russian Realism

This exhibition brings together the work of four Soviet-born artists which span the communist and post-communist worlds. Trained in the exacting style of Soviet Realism that dominated the soviet art academies, each of these artists looked to the West to find a post-communist approach to contemporary realist painting. Drawing from modernism, Pop Art, illustration and conceptual art, each artist has freely explored a variety of approaches and found their own path through the post-communist Russian cultural diaspora.

These works are drawn from the extensive personal collection of global art assembled by the noted vascular surgeon, Wayne Yakes of Denver, Colorado.

Oleg Vassiliev

1931 -2013

One of the most celebrated artists and illustrators of his generation, Vassiliev’s career spanned the Second World War and the demise of the U.S.S.R. He studied painting and illustration at the V.I. Surikov State Art Institute and was one of the founders of the “unofficial” art movement of the 1960s and 70s. For 33 years, he illustrated children’s books in partnership with Erik Bulatov (who’s portrait is included in this exhibition) and developed a highly-personal painting style, based on his scientific studies of energy, light, and space. His work is an important bridge between traditional soviet realism, the modernist avant-garde, and contemporary conceptual realism.

Genia Chef

b. 1954

Genia Chef is an example of a post-soviet global artist. Born in Aktjubinsk, Kazakhstan, U.S.S.R., he studied at the Polygraphic Institute in Moscow in the mid-1970s and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, from 1988 to 1993. An example of an international post-soviet artist, Chef emigrated to Europe in 1985 and to New York City in 1983. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

Komar and Melamid

Vitaly Komar, b. 1943

Alexander Melamid, b. 1945

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid enjoyed a dynamic artistic partnership that lasted from 1972 to 2003. Born in Moscow, both artists studied at the Stroganov Institute of Art and Design and soon made a name for themselves as dissident artists. In 1974, their provocative work was destroyed by Soviet authorities and they were expelled from the youth section of the Moscow Union of Artists in 1975. They were among the first Soviet-born artists to make a place for themselves in the West and immigrated to New York City in 1978.

Their iconoclastic approach navigates through realism, performance, and installation and is grounded in conceptual art. Their work made a significant contribution to the development of postmodern art in America.

One of the most important artists of the Neoclassical Figurative revival movement, Bruno Civitico was born in northern Italy and emigrated to the United States as a teenager. He earned a BFA at Indiana University and an MFA at the Pratt Institute. He was visiting artist at Princeton University and a Professor on the art faculty of The University of New Hampshire, a position he resigned in the mid 1980’s to paint full time.

Civitico emerged as a young artist when abstraction dominated contemporary art and choose to pursue the traditional subjects of landscape, still life, and the human figure in approaches ranging from a direct perceptual realism to a highly mannered Neoclassicism. Drawing on his Italian heritage, Civitico combined traditional subject matter with a complex cubist derived space and contributed, as both an artist and a teacher, to the figurative revival of the Postmodern era.

Drawing has always been a daily practice for Civitico. His natural approach to line, like his paintings, follows traditional subject matter in a variety of styles. Some of the works included herein are preliminary studies for large paintings, quick sketches of germinal ideas for further articulation or drawing as a complete end in itself. The drawings are grouped in the subjects of portraiture, female figures, male figures and group compositions.

Civitico currently lives and maintains a studio in Charleston, South Carolina.

Bruno Civitico: American Classicism Publication (PDF)

Wesley Cochran began collecting in 1973 with the purchase of Romare Bearden’s The Family. Since then, he and his wife and collecting partner, Missy, have amassed a collection of several hundred artworks focused on African-American artists, Andy Warhol, and 20th-century graphics. Their collection, based in LaGrange, Georgia, has toured many American museums and university galleries. This is the first exhibition from the collection that draws from each of the three discreet bodies of work.

The Cochran Collection documents some of the most compelling American art executed in the 20th Century. Works by most of the noted and recognized artists (Warhol, Rosenquist, Johns, Blackburn, Barnet, Gilliam, Picasso and many others) are represented here. These works are a profound documentation of the 20th Century's American social and cultural scene. The selections chosen for The Cochran Collection are reflections of the last half of the last century and manage to point toward what we might expect in and from the art world in this new millennium. The Pop, African-American, Abstract, Representational, Realist, Non-representational, and women artists in The Cochran Collection, portray America's overall popular attitudes, definitions, divisions, and directions. These are some of the factors making The Cochran Collection one of the most significant private art collections in the United States today.

This exhibition is made possible by the support of Jimmy and Ruth Yancey.

America on Paper: Selections From The Cochran Collection Publication (PDF)