Roads Taken: 20th Century Prints and Drawings
from the Collection
August 16 - October 5, 2003

Gallery Talk by Suzanne Foley
Curator of Collections and Exhibitions
Sunday, September 28, 2 pm, In the Museum

A selection of works on paper from the Museum’s print and drawing collections speaks to many diverse artistic proclivities. Over the past forty years artists have used art processes to follow their aesthetic
intents. The sheer joy of ink gestures on a page for Robert Motherwell or Ellsworth Kelly’s simple outline of a leaf in lithographic crayon share their pleasures in making art. The majority of works in the exhibition speak from the artist’s social perspective, like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s collage drawing commenting on salmon fishing, Kara Walker’s African/American linocut, and Luis Jimenez’s observation on servitude in The Mass of Mankind. Other artists' interests become series of explorations. Joe Tilson created contemporary proscinemi–images left behind by pilgrims and documented them in his prints, while in Nancy Graves’s hands geologic maps of lunar orbiter and Apollo landing sites became amazing abstract lithographs.

Several of the works included among the twenty pieces have never been exhibited here and some have rarely been shown. Also represented in the exhibition are Chryssa, Jim Dine, John Ferren, Howard Finster, Johnny Friedlaender, Robert Indiana, Sol LeWitt, Tom Marioni, Nathan Oliveira, Alison Saar, Pat Steir, and Wayne Thiebaud. The exhibition was organized by curator Suzanne Foley and pays homage to a long museum career.

Alison Saar (American, born 1956). Snake Man, 1994.
Woodcut and lithograph, 12/20, 28 x 37".
Published by Vinalhaven Press, Vinalhaven, Maine.
Museum Purchase with funds form the FUNd, 1995.2.
Collection University of Virginia Art Museum.
Image © the Artist