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AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center
Courtyard Gallery
Past Exhibitions
- Vast Hedge / Vestige
Dan Sutherland - compose project this image
Karri Paul - Life Lines
Sandra Fernández - Four Letter Words
Paintings by Michael Mogavero - Wayfinding
An installation by Jennifer Chenoweth - Green Space / Outer Space, new works by Leslie Mutchler
- Kenneth J. Hale: New Work from Carmel, CA
- Synchronicity of Color
Sculptural Site-Specific Works by Margo Sawyer - Tracing: Images of Italy
Photographs by Lawrence McFarland - Broken Gold
Drawings by Jonathan Faber and Photographs by Barry Stone
Vast Hedge / Vestige
Dan Sutherland
Exhibition Dates
September 15, 2011 – January 27, 2012
Reception
Thursday, September 15, 4–7 PM
About the Artist
Dan Sutherland is a professor of painting and drawing in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Sutherland has exhibited work throughout the US including in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth. He is currently represented by Moody Gallery in Houston and David Shelton Gallery in San Antonio.
compose project this image
Karri Paul
Exhibition Dates
May 5 – September 2, 2011
Reception
Thursday, May 5, 4–6 PM
About the Artist
Karri Paul received her M.F.A. in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008, a graduate certificate from the University of Iowa Center for the Book in 1999, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1998. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, Boston Review, Fence, Poetry International, and elsewhere. She founded The O. Press, which produced a number of limited edition letterpress broadsides and artists' books. Paul has taught for a number of institutions including the Maryland Institute, College of Art and Johns Hopkins University. She currently teaches at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
Gallery Admission
Free / Open to Public
Life Lines
Sandra Fernández
Exhibition Dates
February 3 – April 28, 2011
Reception
Thursday, February 3, 4 – 6 PM
About the Artist
Assistant Professor Sandra C. Fernández, an Ecuadorean-American artist, received her B.S. and M.F.A. in art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She studied printmaking techniques at ‘Taller Tres en Raya’ in Madrid, Spain. She has received New York Foundation for the Arts grants and was selected for the Pan-am Public Art Project: Art without Borders, Women's Pavilion in Buffalo New York. Her awards include the Women of color Slide Portfolio: Hispanic national Juried Project, and the participation in the SERIE Project, a Latino Arts organization based in Austin, Texas. Fernández's works are held by private, public and corporate collectors, including the Kohler Art Library in Madison, Wisconsin, Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, France, The Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana in Quito-Ecuador, the Mexic Arte Museum in Austin, Texas, among others.
Exhibition Essay
The cell, which is the smallest complete unit of a living organism, can refer in everyday language to anything self-contained that functions on its own. A cell is tight, compact, separate from other entities—sometimes extremely so; an even more common use of the word ‘cell’ refers to the room where a prisoner is housed, safely away from civil society. Sandra Fernández's recent works call up all the above notions of the cell, but most of their formal qualities evoke biological cellular structures: small, complex systems teeming with life and energy.
Fernández's manipulation of materials affirms the double bind that occurs when we examine cells. Under a microscope, we discover that one structural unit is held together by many smaller components, and the thing that we assume to be complete and perfectly functional becomes contingent and even unstable. Fernández's recent installations use hand stitching, sometimes with metal wire, to attach part to part in a way that highlights the works' handcrafted facture. In certain moments, a cell's core hooks into an outside wooden layer, all of it connected through wire. The wire leaves traces of the artist's hand-wire can bend to the slightest irregularities in touch, giving it the ability to imprint the artist's every move—and thus becomes a lifeline through which we observe the story of each work's construction. By following this story, we keep pace with Fernández's ever-shifting modes of expression and also with the events in her life. The formal instability of the work matches life's unpredictability—its tendency to recycle past moments over and over, sometimes in nearly inscrutable ways.
Organic components are, in fact, a long-standing feature of Fernández's work because of their ability to symbolize [signify?] major life processes. As she sews together pieces of burlap, parchment, vellum, and everyday objects like store receipts and bits of garbage, her thread bites into each element in a manner both aggressive and tender. Trauma and change are similarly bound into human experience. At the moment they occur, certain life events may frighten us, but our distance from them gradually knits in the pleasure or wisdom of hindsight, making the memories of those events continually restless. Fernández's work shows that even the act of remembering can trouble the memory of an experience, and that fracturing a thing that was once whole is a good allegory for recollection.
As she tears things apart and reconstitutes them in new formations, Fernández is in a sense problematizing the assumptions one might make about printmaking: the notion of printing from a single matrix presumes a stable and unified original source. As Fernández herself insists, she is free to change the original each time, adding and re-attaching elements by hand and intervening on the mechanical process of printing. This unpredictability also speaks to cellular formations, which often function together as identical units but are unique sites of action unto themselves. As Fernández twists, sews, paints, carves, stamps, and affixes together disparate elements, she argues for life seen not as a progression but as a constant reorganization of parts.
Katie Anania is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a regular contributor to Artforum.com. She is currently at work on a dissertation on drawing and privacy in postwar American art.
Four Letter Words
Paintings by Michael Mogavero
Send Love
Give Love
Soar
Land Ho
Exhibition Dates
September 9, 2010 – January 27, 2011
Reception
Thursday, September 9, 4 – 6 PM
About the Artist
Michael Mogavero received his M.F.A. from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. Since that time his solo exhibitions have been held at the Holly Solomon, Ruth Siegel & Oscarson Siegeltuch Galleries in New York, Galerie Six Freidrich in Munich, Germany, and Galerie Corinne Hummel in Basel, Switzerland. Group exhibitions include “200 years of Drawing” (a survey of drawing in the last two centuries) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and “Back to the USA” (a survey exhibition of contemporary American art which traveled throughout Europe). Public collections of his work include AT&T, The Prudential Insurance Company, the Walker Art Center, and the Princeton University Art Museum.
Wayfinding
An installation by Jennifer Chenoweth
Exhibition Dates
May 13 – August 27
Reception
Thursday, May 13, 4 – 6 PM
About the Artist
Jennifer Chenoweth has an M.F.A. degree in studio art from The University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. degree from the “great books” program at St. John's College, and a B.F.A. degree in painting and sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. Chenoweth has exhibited work in numerous places, including, most recently, the Red Dot Art Fair in London, the Bridge Art Fair in Miami, Art Santa Fe, Art City Austin, Art Night Austin, and the East Austin Studio Tour.
Inspired by the four elements (earth, water, air and fire), her flowing wall installation for Wayfinding will create a unique topography that utilizes the full length of the gallery space and includes such unique media as ink drawings on rice paper, torch-cut metal, dripped paint, and repeating, spiraling cones cast in plaster.
Green Space / Outer Space, new works by Leslie Mutchler
Outer Space/ Green Space (California Academy of Sciences), 2009, digital print on Somerset paper, 30 x 40 inches
Exhibition Dates
February 4 – May 7, 2010
Reception
February 4, 4 – 6 PM
About the Artist
Leslie Mutchler, assistant professor and area head of 2D Foundations in the Department of Art and Art History, has created a new series of digital collages that are culled from catalogue glossies such as IKEA, West Elm, and Pottery Barn to create both fictional and real realms focusing on the current use and misuse of ‘green space’ and ‘outer space.’ By rethinking the model of efficient, built and controlled environments, Mutchler's collages present these relevant environments in favor of commodity and purchase power, without the restriction of waste.
Mutchler was recently awarded the John D. Murchinson Fellowship in Art, the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in the Arts Fellowship, and the Creative Research Grant, all from University of Texas at Austin. Mutchler's work has been included in numerous exhibitions across the country, including ones at the Crane Arts Center in Philadelphia, the Harvey Gallery at Miami University in Ohio, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City, and the Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee. She has been included in a series of group exhibitions at venues around Texas, including Cactus Bra in San Antonio, dberman Gallery in Austin, and Box13 Art Space in Houston. Green Space / Outer Space at the Courtyard Gallery will be Mutchler's first solo show in Austin, and an essay by Eric Zimmerman (M.F.A. in Studio Art, 2005) will accompany the exhibition.
Kenneth J. Hale: New Work from Carmel, CA
Exhibition Dates
September 1, 2009 – January 29, 2010
Reception
September 24, 2009, 4 – 6 PM
About the Artist
This exhibition features the work of artist Kenneth Hale. Hale received his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. His paintings, prints, and drawings have been widely exhibited and collected. One-person exhibitions have been held in numerous cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Bangkok, Madrid, Dallas, San Francisco, Ft. Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. Professor Hale's prints are represented in collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of American Art, Washington DC, the Achenbach Foundation, San Francisco, the Atlantic Richfield Collection, the American Airlines Collection, the McNay Art Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth.
This exciting exhibition of new work produced summer 2009 showcases Hale's pursuits with digital and collage works on paper evolving from his recent series, Now and Then and The Same Only Different. There will be an essay provided by Laura Lindenberger Wellen.
Synchronicity of Color
Sculptural Site–Specific Works by Margo Sawyer
Exhibition Dates
January 24 – May 9, 2009
Reception
February 5, 2009, 4 – 6 PM
About the Artist
Margo Sawyer received her M.F.A. from the Yale University sculpture program in 1982. She is a Professor of Sculpture/Studio Art in the M.F.A. program at The University of Texas at Austin. Sawyer was part of the collaborative team, headed by San Francisco landscape design firm Hargreaves Associates and architect Larry Speck of Page Sutherland Page Architects to design a new park in downtown Houston, called Discovery Green. Sawyer created four site-specific works for the park that integrate art and architecture entitled Synchronicity of Color.
Tracing: Images of Italy
Photographs by Lawrence McFarland
The Tracing series was produced between 1991 and 2004 and pays tribute to interior and exterior Italian landscapes both urban and rural. Each panoramic image contains a narrative evoking in the viewer an emotional response to a particular place in time.
The Beginning of Acqua Alta
Exhibit Dates
September 29, 2008 – January 10, 2009
About the Artist
Lawrence McFarland received his M.F.A. from the University of Nebraska in 1976 and is a William and Bettye Nowlin Endowed Professor in Photography in the Department of Art and Art History, College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded three NEA fellowships (1978–79,1984–85, and 1990–91) and a Friends of Photography Ferguson Grant. His photographs are in numerous collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, among others. He has worked on several documentary projects including the Central Arizona Cannal Project creating a body of work to help document and preserve the endangered sacred land of the Navajo tribe. Most recently he has produced a series of panoramic images in the American West and Italy.
Broken Gold
Drawings by Jonathan Faber and Photographs by Barry Stone
Exhibition Dates
May 14 – August 28, 2009
Reception
May 14, 4–6 PM
About the Artists
The phrase ‘Broken Gold’ is borrowed from the pawnshop's marquee. Like pieces of broken gold rendered down and returned to elemental forms, Jonathan Faber and Barry Stone's exhibition, Broken Gold, is a synthesis of drawings and photographs poured in together to create one unbroken visual idea. Jonathan Faber graduated from the UT Austin M.F.A. program in 2003 and is currently a Lecturer at both the University of Texas at Austin and Southwestern University in Georgetown. Barry Stone graduated from the UT Austin M.F.A. program in 2001 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography in the College of Art and Design at Texas State University–San Marcos.
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