The Dennos Museum Center at Northwestern Michigan College will open two new exhibitions on March10 that will be shown through June 2, 2013; Rufus Snoddy: The Wings of Icarus and Larry Cressman: Line Work.
Rufus Snoddy: The Wings of Icarus will showcase new works by this important nationally recognized artist who resides and works in the Traverse City area and continues to exhibit throughout the United States and other countries.
“Rufus Snoddy is a well-recognized artist is the region and his work has been shown often in many locations, when inviting Rufus to exhibit at the Dennos we encouraged him to present something that would be a dramatically different installation from what people have seen before,” says Gene Jenneman, Director of the Dennos, “Wings of Icarus is that exhibition.
Rufus writes of the exhibition, “The Wings of Icarus is an installation of suspended construction paintings inspired by the mythological story of Icarus. I utilize traditional media and materials from my immediate environment to create visual metaphors. So too did Daedalus use the feathers, wood, wax and string found in the Labyrinth to make the wings he and his son Icarus used to escape the Prison of Minos. They both had successful attempts at flight, but in his haste, ignorance and arrogance, Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell to his demise. The story is an archetypal lesson of hubris, myopia and the intoxication of power.”
Larry Cressman: Line Work will showcase works by this nationally recognized artist who is a professor at the School of Art & Design and Residential College of the University of Michigan.
Line is the focus and driving force of Larry Cressman’s work. This exhibition will explore line on and off the wall with “installation drawings” that incorporate cane, twigs paper, graphite, wire, and other materials – much of it floating off the gallery wall or as 3-D constructions that hang from the ceiling and float within the gallery space.
Cressman writes, “I began to experiment by constructing drawings as collections of lines gathered into transparent envelopes. I wove lines through holes punctured in paper. Finally, I began to pin lines in gestural compositions directly on gallery walls – creating large line “drawings” that responded to the architectural space in which they were placed. Because these drawings were three-dimensional, light and shadow became a natural part of the work.”
Exhibition programming at the Dennos Museum Center is made possible with support from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert T and Ruth Haidt Hughes Memorial Endowment Fund. Housing support comes from Cambria Suites and media support from TV 7&4 and WCMU Public Broadcasting.
The Rufus Snoddy exhibition is additionally supported with underwriting from Richard and Diana Milock.
The Dennos Museum Center is open Monday to Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM, Thursday until 8 PM and Sundays 1-5 PM. Admission is $6.00 adults, $4.00 for children and free to museum members. For more information on the Museum and its programs, go to www.dennosmuseum.org or call 231-995-1055. The Dennos Museum Center is located at 1410 College Drive, Traverse City, MI 49686, at the entrance to the campus of Northwestern Michigan College.