University Of Hawai'i Art Gallery - CURRENT & COMING EXHIBITS

UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES:

The Art Gallery, Commons Gallery,

and the John Young Museum of Art

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I AT MĀNOA

Still Standing
Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition

Enrico Battan, Mari Matsuda, and Erik Sullivan

Opening Reception

Date: March 3, 2024, Sunday, 2:00--4:00 PM
Location: The Art Gallery, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM), Art Building

March 3 -- March 31, 2024
The Art Gallery, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM), Art Building

The Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition, Still Standing, is the culmination of the three-year graduate program in visual art for the class of 2024. Mari Matsuda brings decades of experience in social movements in Hawaiʻi to her large-scale woodblock prints. Her masterfully rendered prints echo the rawness and conviction of German Expressionist artists such as Kathe Kollwitz, who advocated for the disadvantaged. Erik Sullivan has constructed a narrative, consisting of a large-scale sculpture and paintings, about the day-to-day life of a fictional character who is struggling with crippling effects of anxiety. Through patient, meditative paint handling, he creates a coherent world in which the affliction is ultimately overcome through connection and attention to the present moment. Enrico Battan uses the transparency of glass to speak about the opaque and distressing situation on our Southern Border Wall with Mexico, as well as its impact on migrants and the communities in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. He sees his material, glass, as transmutable in nature, much like memories. Drawing on photographs that he took at border wall protests, he fires screen printed imagery into large-scale glass sculptures. The depictions of butterfly signs held by children at the protest serve as a symbol of regeneration. All three artists look to the power of art to remain "standing," inspiring resilience and hope. Congratulations to each as they move onto their bright careers in their respective fields.

-Professor Debra Drexler

Address, Hours, Admission:

The Art Gallery

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

2535 McCarthy Mall, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822

(UH Mānoa campus)

Tue. -- Fri, & Sun. 12:00 p.m. -- 4:00 p.m.

Free admission

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Legacy in Ink: Selections from the Print Collection of Charles Cohan

Gallery Walkthrough: A Conversation about Prints

Date: March 10, 2024, Sunday, 2:00--4:00 PM

Location: John Young Museum of Art
Located in Krauss Hall at 2500 Dole Street Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822

Dr. Robert E Steele, Scholar and Collector of African American Prints
Katherine Love, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Honolulu Museum of Art
Professor Charles Cohan, Chair of Printmaking, UHM
Professor Debra Drexler, Acting Director of the Galleries and Museum, UHM

Special guest, Dr. Robert E. Steele was born in Mobile, Alabama, and graduated from Morehouse College. He attended the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked at Harlem and Bellevue Hospitals in New York City on a Robbins Post-Graduate Fellowship. He earned a master's in public health and a Ph.D. in psychology at Yale University. At the University of Maryland, College Park, Bob served as an Associate Professor of Psychology, Associate Dean in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Director of Diversity Affairs for the Graduate School, and for nearly 10 years was Executive Director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of te Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. Bob and his wife Jean are current residents of Hawai‘i and have been collecting art, primarily prints, by African American artists since 1968. They have loaned works from their collection to a number of nationally traveling exhibitions and have gifted works to institutions such as Morehouse College and Yale University. Now on view through Sept. 29 at the Honolulu Museum of Art are a selection of works HoMA recently acquired in Forward Together: African American Prints from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection.

Charles Cohan, Professor and Area Chair of Printmaking in the Department of Art and Art History is a celebrated printmaker, educator, and master printer. The prints presented in this exhibition were selected from over two thousand hand printed works on paper collected since 1984. The collection represents prints by fellow printmakers, printers' proofs produced by Cohan's Arm and Roller Press, international collaborative exchange portfolios, artists' books, and zines.

Some prints predate Cohan's time at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (1994 to present). During his studies at California College of Arts and Crafts, under master lithographer Charles Gill, he gained an understanding of the act of printing for artists, and the collecting of "printers' proofs" as a byproduct of the artist/printer collaboration. During his graduate work at Cranbrook Academy of Art, as screen printer for the Graphic Design Program, he received prints as payment. He was a printer at Stone Press Editions in Seattle, where he had the opportunity to work with Jacob Lawrence, one of the most significant artists of the twentieth-century. Cohan printed Lawrence's work , To the Defense, which examined racial injustice in America. In the early 1990s, Cohan developed a relationship with the printmaking community in Capetown, South Africa, where he editioned prints for the local artists through a multi-year residency at Jonathan Comerford's Hard Ground Printmakers Workshop.

As a professor at the University of Hawai‘i, for three decades he has generously shared his printmaking expertise with visiting artists, often guiding them through the process of creating a series of prints. Cohan has also participated in workshops in Italy, New Zealand, and Australia, both as an artist and as a master printmaker. At Pilchuck Glass School, he printed for a number of artists including Terry Adkins, a conceptual artist who bridged Modernism with African aesthetics through the use of an alternative matrix. At Anderson Ranch he printed an edition for L.A. based painter Allison Miller. As a professor of printmaking since 1989, the number of student prints that have been contributed to his collection is in the hundreds. In addition, Cohan has amassed an archive of over five hundred prints from nearly thirty collaborative portfolio projects. These projects are formed by groups of printmakers who exchange their works, eventually to collate them into portfolios as "sets" inclusive of one print per artist. In addition, Cohan has inherited over one hundred zines and fifty artists' books from colleagues around the world. Selections from these sets may be seen at this exhibition.

Cohan sees the importance that a collection of prints can play as an educational tool in academic and creative communities. His collection is a testament to the pursuit of excellence in printmaking that he inspires in his students and the printmaking community.

Address, Hours, Admission:

John Young Museum of Art
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Located in Krauss Hall at 2500 Dole Street Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822

(UH Mānoa campus)

Tue. -- Fri, & Sun. 12:00 p.m. -- 4:00 p.m.

Free admission

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