The Art of Comfort (Antique Quilts and Bed Coverings from the Pilgrim/Roy Collection)

University of Kentucky Art Museum

How Meatyard made a stage set of his native Kentucky to portray his circle of friends and compose his eerie tableaux Stages for Being examines the photography that Ralph Eugene Meatyard created in and around Lexington, Kentucky, where he found abandoned houses in the countryside to use as sets, and directed friends and family members in scenes that suggest both ritual and theater. Establishing mood with natural lighting, he used masks, dolls and found objects as unsettling props and mined architectural detail for abstract compositional elements. Meatyard culled inspiration from a wide variety of sources. An autodidact in areas as diverse as jazz, painting, literature, history and Zen Buddhism, his voracious reading sparked endless ideas for his carefully constructed photographs. His process was also informed by consistent dialogue with a robust group of Kentucky peers, including the writer, environmental activist and farmer Wendell Berry; photographers Van Deren Coke and Robert C. May; the Trappist monk Thomas Merton; the painter Frederic Thursz; and the writer, poet and philosopher Guy Davenport, all of whom worked in the region but were engaged with contemporary ideas and practice in their fields. Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–72) attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Photography quickly became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Meatyard's work is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Smithsonian Institution and many other important collections.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Stages for Being

Arts & Photography

Cox, Julian

Photography & Video

Five decades of Yau's diverse poetic collaborations with artists from Pat Steir to Richard TuttleThe poetry of Chinese American poet John Yau (born 1950) is infused with humor and intelligence. Yau uses a variety of poetic forms to examine aspects of visual art, film and popular culture. His critical writing is celebrated for providing fresh insights about already codified artists and for situating diverse practitioners into historical contexts. Disguise the Limit features numerous works that Yau has created with visual artists during the past five decades. These include paintings, mixed-media drawings, print portfolios, artist's books and letterpress broadsides. The result of friendships and shared sensibilities, these works reveal the poet's embrace of both representation and abstraction as foils for language generation. Offering nimble turns of phrase, Zen koans, road sign warnings and fragmented poems, Yau is in his element when operating in the performative time and space that collaboration requires. Artists include: Jake Berthot, Tom Burckhardt, Norman Bluhm, Pia Fries, Max Gimblett, Judy Ledgerwood, Suzanne McClelland, Malcolm Morley, Ed Paschke, Peter Saul, Pat Steir, Robert Therrien, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Webster.

Disguise the Limit: John Yau's Collaborations

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

When it comes to early twentieth century modernism, Edward Franklin Fisk (1886 -1944) is something of an odd man out. Although his art was championed and exhibited by several New York galleries, his reputation never attained the mixture of glamour and spirituality enjoyed by his close friends Charles Demuth, Stuart Davis, and Eugene O'Neill. Born in New York City, Fisk studied in Paris, where he joined in the soirees at Gertrude Stein's apartment, and later he was an active participant among the intellectual circles of Greenwich Village and Provincetown. Having absorbed avant-garde styles and ideas, he moved in 1926 to Lexington where he taught at the University of Kentucky, raised a family, and struggled to maintain his artistic integrity in a setting far from the front lines of American modernism.The bulk of Fisk's extant works are oil paintings --gently abstracted, often intensely colored -- that present the farms and towns of Kentucky and Vermont in a style that balances the influences of European expressionism with American realism. Devoted to red, blue, and green, Fisk developed a formalist rigor that emphasized the flatness and frontality of his subjects, whether an isolated tree beside the side of a house, a tabletop assortment of vases, flowers, and fruits, or a portrait of a model in his studio. When he was in his late 40's, Fisk took on the printmaking media and mastered the difficult processes of etching and mezzotint, producing prints which are impressive for their range of tone and intimate subject matter.

Edward Fisk: American Modernist

Rachel Sadinsky

William G. Sackett

Contemporary art quilts: The John M. Walsh III collection

Shaw, Robert

History

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Books by University of Kentucky Art Museum